In The Cities We Lost, I argued that the port cities of Eastern Mediterranean possessed a vanished cosmopolitanism that enriched the entire Middle East region, because they imparted to their diverse ethnic and religious groups the skills of coexistence, cultural flexibility and negotiation. The cultured and historical communities living in these melting pots mutually enriched each other through cross-pollination.The end of the cosmopolitan period and its replacement by stifling, monocultural nationalisms resulted in these cities being subsumed into the new nation-states that replaced the Ottoman Empire. As a result, they lost their unique ethnic blends and the region as a whole became poorer. Today, we are on the threshold of a new cosmopolitan age, but one much crueler than the 19th centurys. We are riding a globalising technological revolution that is fostering greater inequality and resentment while ushering in no-holds-barred neoliberalism. For the first time in history, the Internet has created a global commons, a universal platform that fuels a winner-take-all economy while shearing away the myriad local replications of services that previously acted as an anchor for the worlds middle classes. A few global chains are piggybacking on the Internet to dominate their fields: Amazon is dislodging local bookshops, Netflix displacing cinemas, and The New York Times is becoming the worlds newspaper of record at the expense of countless national, regional and local rivals. As a result, were witnessing an exponential contraction as the majority lose purchasing power and shift downwards while the profits of the one percent accelerate away. As technology spreads, it fuels extreme wealth alongside Dickensian poverty, and nowhere illustrates this more dramatically than the worlds megacities. Logically, Eastern Mediterraneans once-cosmopolitan ports might re-emerge as hotspots of opportunity and privilege. But in the age of winner-take-all globalisation, rather than a string of self-reinforcing hubs, Istanbul is the only city booming, and largely through catering to new elites. aljazeera/indepth/opinion/2014/04/istanbul-coming-neo-cosmopolitan-20144312445133382.html
Posted on: Sun, 06 Apr 2014 08:02:44 +0000
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